Hospital operations are all the work a hospital does around a patient's treatment that the patient never sees. Before an operation can start, someone must check the surgeon, book the operating theatre, sterilise the instruments, find working equipment and buy the supplies. Hospital operations software, also called hospital back-office software, does much of this work.
Here is a typical case. A 72-year-old grandmother in Coimbatore has broken her hip in a fall at home. Her surgeon plans a hip replacement for Thursday morning. In this operation, the broken top of the thigh bone is replaced with an artificial hip.
First, the hospital must be sure that the surgeon is allowed to do this operation. Credentialing software has already checked his medical registration, his training and his past record. It records which operations he may perform in this hospital.
Next, the theatre must be booked. Operating room scheduling software finds a two-hour slot on Thursday when the theatre, the surgeon, the anaesthetist and two nurses are all free. The hospital operations platform holds the nurses' shift rosters and the contracts with suppliers. Through one of these contracts, the hospital orders the right size of artificial hip from the implant company.
The night before, the instrument tray for hip operations is cleaned and goes through a steam sterilizer. Surgical instrument tracking records each step by scanning the tray's barcode. So the tray that reaches the theatre on Thursday is complete and sterile.
On Thursday morning, a nurse needs an infusion pump, a machine that feeds medicine into a vein at a set rate. A real-time location system (RTLS) shows that the nearest free pump is in a storeroom on the same floor. That pump was checked last month by the hospital's biomedical engineers, with biomedical test equipment. These engineers test every machine in the hospital on a schedule.
After the operation, the grandmother spends the first night in the intensive care unit (ICU). ICU device integration software reads her monitor every minute and records her heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen level in her record. If several readings start to worsen together, it warns the nurse early. This is a use of anomaly detection.
Most of this software is sold to American hospitals, and a large part of it is built by engineers in India. Indian hospital chains now use the same kinds of software as they grow, and as they prepare for NABH accreditation. NABH is India's national accreditation board for hospitals. The operating theatre, the ICU bed and the nurse's shift are a hospital's scarcest resources. So a hospital that plans them well can treat more patients in the same building.